Brass spoon?

Brass is a mix of copper and zinc. Brass is a little heavier/denser than steel, and about twice as much as titanium.

In other words, it's fairly heavy. Might be ok for a bug out bag/long term no grid survival, but for regular hiking etc, not so much.

Bamboo is fairly good all around material for this application.

You can alway go with a silver spoon

My generation was born with one of those in our mouths.

"Rinse with water, wait a few hours, and your spoon is 100% germ-free."

I was recently involved in a nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infection research project, and I found myself doing a little reading of the literature on copper alloys. It's amazing. There are very few surfaces on earth (within the 0-100C temperature window) that are truly free of bacteria. There are bacteria inside airplane fuel tanks, in clouds, in boiling water hotsprings, and in pockets of "fossil water" deep within the earth. But they don't survive long on brass. I find this astounding. I'd love to see brass begin to replace stainless steel in healthcare settings.

It doesn't do anything to protozoan cysts or oocysts, though (Giardia and Crypto).

Copper and copper-alloy coatings also work. Copper electroplated onto some other material wouldn't last forever, but it would have the antibacterial properties.

copper plating your kit would look hella trendy.
it is possible to plate things with copper. i had one time a need for a circular main bearing on my bmw bike to be another half a 'thou larger in outer diameter, so i had my plating guy build it up with copper. thermal shrunk that puppy home, and it worked the treat.
a spoon and pot copper plated would really set one apart in the rampat competition of the camp-kitchen-chic world.

might try plating them at home, it is not horribly technical, although it might stench out the kitchen. i have no idea.

god luck !
v.

We live in an overly aseptic society obsessed with protecting ourselves from bacteria and virus's, yet more and more research is showing the importance of gut bacteria, exposure to bacteria in childhood preventing allergies, and even the benefit bacteria on our skin.

Why is everyone still so afraid of bacteria?

Max Kickstart a Silver plated Titanium sporkspoon… I will get in line…!

Just to be clear, using a bacteria-free eating utensil does nothing to harm the beneficial bacteria in your gut or on your skin. Nobody is suggesting adding antibiotics to your backcountry meals or attempting to sterilize your clothes.

The community of bacteria that live in and on us is known as the "human microbiome", and it isn't a new discovery. The number of bacterial cells in and on our bodies outnumbers our own cells and the ratio is something like 10:1 (bacteria are far smaller than our cells). We each carry around about four pounds of bacteria all the time. It goes without saying that we need those bacteria.

But some bacteria are pathogens. Before Holmes, Semmelweis, and Lister, most deaths in hospitals were from infections transmitted by health care workers and instruments. Hand washing and instrument sterilization saved many thousands of lives. Campaigns to encourage people in developing countries to practice regular handwashing and disinfect their drinking water have tremendous positive effects on public health, including drastically increasing the survival of young children. Frankly, objecting to disinfection is a luxury of first-world yuppies.

Backpackers get diarrhea from enteric pathogens. Those people don't benefit from those infections (their immune systems don't get fortified). If there are enteric bacteria on your hands from contact with contaminated stream water, you are less likely to introduce those into your food if they can't survive on the surfaces of your utensils.

We clean the toilet with cleaners & wash the dirty pots with the usual washing-up liquid – everything else in the house just gets a wipe with a wet or dry cloth. If the TV adverts for bug killer cleaning products are to believed our family should be dead.

I'm not advocating for banning disinfectants and antibiotics, just saying they are over used and overhyped. When MRSA really takes off, you'll start agreeing with me.

I use hand sanitizer after I poop, but other than that don't use any soap in the backcountry. I do take "bandanna baths" every night to keep clean but no soap. ~200 nights out so far, often without treating the water and I have yet to become seriously ill while backpacking. A brass spoon just sounds ridiculous to me.

"I'm not advocating for banning disinfectants and antibiotics, just saying they are over used and overhyped."

I guess I misunderstood. Everyone here will agree that, in developed countries, disinfectants are overused and antibiotics are overprescribed. But you objected to a spoon that incorporates neither disinfectants nor antibiotics.

"When MRSA really takes off, you'll start agreeing with me."

I mentioned that I've done nosocomial infection research. You must be quite an expert if you have information about MRSA that will change my opinions about infection control.

The benefit in reduced infection risk from a brass spoon would probably be very small. But, given that some research suggests that hand-to-mouth transmission might account for most cases of backcountry-acquired enteric infections, the reduction in risk might not be negligible. And carrying a brass spoon is certainly not going to hurt anyone. The reduction in risk might be too small to be meaningful to you, but a brass spoon won't harm anyone's gut flora or change the community of bacteria on their skin, as you implied in your first post. If you didn't mean to imply that, then I'm left wondering about the relevance of your statements about beneficial bacteria.

Sorry but we can't all be nosocomial infection researchers. If I'm wrong about MRSA so be it, but my understanding is it's only getting worse and is exacerbated by over prescribing antibiotics. If that isn't the case, please inform me!

My statement relates to the prevalent thought process around bacteria which is boiled down to bacteria=bad so kill all of them. I wasn't intending to write a research paper for an online backpacking forum so excuse my lack of citations. MRSA doesn't have anything to do with brass spoons, I was using it as an example of some of the consequences of this thought process.

Also I have a hard time seeing how "hand to mouth" transmission would be helped with a brass spoon since by definition you are using a spoon, not your hand. Most people don't go around grabbing their utensils by the eating end.

Ah. I wonder if we both made the mistake of assuming that the other was saying something too simplistic. I assumed that you didn't accept the importance of killing some kinds of bacteria, and maybe you assumed that I didn't recognize that some bacteria should not be killed.

In any case, I'm not suggesting that we should be paranoid about pathogenic bacteria being transferred from one surface to another throughout our backpacking kit. But your doubts about significant contact with the round end of a spoon seems like wishful thinking. If there are any pathogenic bacteria on your hands (and there usually won't be), they will also end up all over your eating utensil. It seems clear to me that the brass spoon idea would probably have a small benefit and it would do no harm.

I think….that you are worrying about absolutely nothing worthwhile….when you worry about how bacteria resistant your spoon is.

If you are worried, put your spoon in the hot water as it heats to boiling.

I only lick my spoon clean, and put it in pack. Never wash it. Not even once home. It has been used and licked clean many times.

Im still alive.

I find it amazing that so many adults think it makes good sense to base an argument on the fact that they have personally never experienced the negative outcome in question. Three people in this short thread have done that already.

Epidemiological data says that eating bushmeat (monkeys, bats, rodents) in Africa or Southeast Asia is associated with an increased risk of disease, particularly viruses. Ebola, SARS, and HIV came from bushmeat. The next global pandemic will probably come from bushmeat. But when people in Africa or Southeast Asia are asked whether they are aware of the risks of eating bushmeat, their answer is always the same: I've been doing this my whole life and nothing bad ever happened to me, so anyone who says there is a risk must be wrong. How does that argument sound? Given their comments in this thread, I assume Ross, Mike, and MB are on board with that reasoning.

Your personal experience has nothing to do with risk.

Also, I bet some of the people here who count their pack weight in grams and cut the handles off their toothbrushes are the same ones who are objecting to the brass spoon idea because any benefit is likely to be small.

I'm not campaigning for brass spoons. I'm still posting to this thread because I think the reasons people have given for objecting to the idea are embarrassing.

"If you are worried, put your spoon in the hot water as it heats to boiling."

+1

Copper is reactive and might need polishing

The aesthetics might be worth it, however. And it could be a great conversation piece!

So you're close on your basic assumption, but far off enough that you'll wind up likely doing yourself some serious harm. Brass (and several other materials, including silver) are what's considered bacteriostatic. That is to say they stop the growth of bacteria, which is in contrast to something like Lysol, which is bactericidal, which is to say they kill bacteria. What this means is that while this spoon won't assist in the growth of bacteria (unlike a piece of say bread would, providing nutrients), it will do nothing to kill the bacteria or spores on the spoon. The last part about spores is of particular interest here.

Spores, unlike numerous live bacterial strains, are not easily killed by stomach acid, saliva, or sometimes even boiling at 100C. These are one of the primary reasons you wash items, as most bacterial cells die on desiccation alone, though a spore will often times persist.

Add all this to the fact that I'm not really sure brass would be the safest material to consume (heavy metal poising, etc), the additional weight, and perhaps foul taste, I would recommend against this course of action.

Like above I don't think brass would make for a good spoon. I think it would taste off & be prone to verdi gris. Brass doesn't react well with certain substances either.

As for cutting the handle off my toothbrush – what toothbrush? I also don't eat bushmeat.

Any contribution I've made to this thread is to agree that many people are just too hung up on avoiding germs whether that's in the home or backcountry. Doesn't mean I'm totally cavalier. I like to think I take a common sense approach. I don't think they teach that anymore.

Wow, comparing eating with regular spoons to eating African bushmeat. You've got me! I am an illiterate cave man!

Risk = probability x outcome

When probability approaches 0, I really don't give a hoot. If I did, I would shut myself in my house all day and eat nothing but blanched cabbage and distilled water.

Cameron, I think you should do a little more reading about survival of bacteria on copper alloy surfaces. There are quite a few papers about it now. Stainless steel does nothing to support bacterial growth, either, but bacteria survive much longer on stainless steel than on brass. Some bacteria that survive for hours on stainless steel die in minutes on brass.

Also, the enteric bacteria of greatest concern to backpackers are not spore-formers.

Also, you can't get heavy-metal poisoning from using a brass utensil.

"So you're close on your basic assumption, but far off enough that you'll wind up likely doing yourself some serious harm."

What serious harm are you talking about? And this serious harm is "likely"? From using a brass spoon?

This thread gets better and better. Anyone want to accuse brass spoons of witchcraft?

Colin, thankfully most of the papers you've come across were likely written by my colleges, a few of which I've had the pleasure of reviewing before they even went to publication. Many of the figures you're referring to are not what you'll see in real world examples but were done in material studies field for different purposes.

Enterics may be the most widely publicized but it's far from the "greatest concern," especially when taking in to account the pathogenicity of other strains.

You can't get heavy metal, you are correct, but you can get metal toxicity, of which copper and zinc is most certainly capable of.

As for the "likely" harm, well I suppose that depends on your definition of harm. Recent studies (since you're fond of reading) have cited that the gut microbiome is responsible for a vast range of functions within the body previously unknown. Things from psychological to immune responses to general functions are thought to be influenced and in some cases dictated by the makeup of this microbiome. By contributing a strain to this biome which otherwise may not be present could have health implications. Again, your definition of likely and harm will vary accordingly.

It sounds like you're granting, circuitously, that brass is bactericidal and you can't get heavy metal poisoning from it.

You can't get copper or zinc poisoning from using a brass spoon, either. I don't know where to start addressing that claim, to be honest. The amount of copper or zinc a person would ingest from occasional use of a brass spoon would be far, far smaller than the copper and zinc already present in a person's diet. The recommended daily allowance for copper is 1mg and for zinc its 11mg. From using a brass spoon for occasional backpacking you'd get nanograms or less. Brass is fairly inert and brass components exposed to constant immersion in water are unchanged after many years.

Zinc toxicity isn't observed in people until the ingested dose reaches about 300mg. If a brass spoon liberated that much zinc it would disappear after about 50 uses. And even if some zinc and copper managed to escape a brass spoon in use, zinc inhibits copper absorption in the gut. I'll stop there. I'm surprised you would even attempt to argue that there is a risk of zinc or copper toxicity from using a brass utensil if, as you say, you have some expertise about biological interactions with metals.

I don't think anthrax and C. perfringens are major concerns for backpacking, despite their pathogenicity. Bacterial pathogens of concern for backpackers don't form spores.

I don't understand your point about "contributing a strain". Is this the "serious" and "likely" harm from brass spoons that you were talking about?
You believe that it is likely that brass spoons could do serious harm by introducing harmful microbes?

Now Im worried.

Im going to start washing my toothbrush after every use as well with soap and hot water.

Cant be too safe you know.

zinc of course is essential in small amounts

If I recall correctly zinc deficiency delays the onset of puberty.

BPL: where I come for heated debates regarding spoon metallurgy!